


Winding

by 26stars



Series: How I Met Melinda [11]
Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: F/F, Red String of Fate, S1 meeting, Soulmate AU, october prompts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-28
Updated: 2018-10-28
Packaged: 2019-08-08 19:30:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,454
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16435424
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/26stars/pseuds/26stars
Summary: It's been a winding road to get here, but it's the only way to pull a thread together'Red string of fate' Soulmate AU





	Winding

**Author's Note:**

  * For [agentmmayy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/agentmmayy/gifts).



Melinda May doesn’t think much about the things people say about the significance of her left-hand little finger, of its compass-like power to tell a person about their proximity to their soulmate. She didn’t feel anything in it for the first 20 years of her life, and even when she did feel a vague ache throughout her long mission undercover at a New York firm in the late nineties, it had faded the second she left the city. If the stories are to be believed, that should have been a sign that her soulmate was somewhere in that city, near enough for their bond to tug at them both.

She wonders if her soulmate felt it. If she tried to follow it up.

But it hardly matters now.

May hasn’t felt anything in that finger for years now, but for some reason, the moment she agrees to join Coulson’s mobile team, it feels like a pin is jabbed into her fingertip. She doesn’t let herself react while Coulson stands there talking to her, and when he leaves she simply goes back to her work, stapling another docket and setting it aside, trying to convince herself that the tingling in her left pinky is just a damaged nerve flaring up.

There is more than one reason that she doesn’t like anyone touching her hands anymore.

~

Skye has heard everyone else’s stories about red strings and soulmates and has clung to that hope desperately for years now, even when the absence of tingles or pain throughout her life might make her believe she is as abandoned by fate as she is by everyone else in her life. She has a vague memory of feeling tingles in that finger sometime during her elementary school years, when she was being rotated between foster families in Staten Island. Now, as a young adult who has felt nothing in that finger for more than a decade, Skye assumes she must have remembered wrong, wishful thinking embalmed into memory.

She doesn’t have a soulmate.

And if she does, it must not be one who cares.

She’s been living in California for almost two years when she meets Mike Petersen. The day she sits down across from him in her favorite diner, she feels a stab in her pinky finger that makes her hand jerk beneath the table. The possibility is confusing, so she makes sure to brush her hand over his once, ostensibly reaching for some sugar packets on the table.

Nothing happens though—no red string appears between their hands—leaving her more confused than ever when he leaves without his driver’s license a few minutes later.

She digs up what she can on him throughout the next day, feeling the tingles grow as the hours pass and she eventually pauses in her digging to google the reason for it.

 _You’re getting closer to each other,_ every SoulSearching message board reads. _The feeling always intensifies when you’re getting closer together._

Skye sits in her chair in the café and presses her fist to her mouth, trying to absorb the fact that she just might have a soulmate after all. She wonders if this means that she should do something…go out and look for them, maybe? But, just like with everything else in her life, all she can do with fate is wait on it.

~

The tingles in her finger had been growing throughout the flight from the Triskellion to the West Coast, but May has been ignoring them as staunchly as she had before. Ever since Bahrain, it’s been resolved in her heart—no one, soulmate or otherwise, deserves to be tied to a mess like her.

It’s the main reason she’d filed for divorce, though not one she wrote down on the papers.

They land in LA, and Coulson and Ward leave to go nab the hacker responsible for the intel leak while she takes the science team to the blown-out lab. As she puts the car in gear to drive them back to the Bus later, the tingling suddenly becomes a throbbing.

~

The tingles in her left hand were super distracting throughout her interrogation with the two SHIELD agents who had turned up at her van and hauled her off with a bag over her head, but despite both of them touching her hands at some point during all the pushing and pulling in out and around the van and plane (plane?), her pinky has nothing to show for it. She has almost played out her amusement at listening to the taller, younger agent spill his and SHIELD’s secrets when the tingles abruptly turn into a throbbing, and she’s almost relieved when the agent seems to pass out and the older agent lets her out of the metal box they’d been locked in.

It _is_ a plane, she confirms as she follows him through the cabin, eyes sweeping actively for any other people on board. The agent shows her a news broadcast of Mike attacking the foreman at his factory, a sight convinces her to hand over her information—and Mike’s driver’s license. Coulson calls through the PA system for his team to congregate around a magical table, and Skye’s hand feels like it’s on fire as three more faces appear.

Two young, one older, all of them radiating skills and experience far beyond her own. Skye circles the table under the guise of pacing as Coulson and his agents try to put the pieces together, and something draws her past the two scientists until she’s standing at the third agent’s elbow. It feels like there’s iron in her bones, straining towards a magnet beside her.

The woman never even glances at Skye, her half-covered hands remaining solidly on her hips the entire time.

When Skye offers to give the team the audio she has of the lab before the blast, she can’t keep her pointed look off the agent next to her when she tells them that they’ll need to get her van back to her home alley in order to decrypt the files. Coulson tosses the agent—Agent May—Skye’s keys and sends them on their way.

~

Her left hand pounds as she climbs into the van with the hacker. The feeling doesn’t recede as she drives them away from the plane, back into the city.

She keeps her hands on the wheel or folded behind her arms and pretends she can’t feel anything.

~

She never got to talk to the female agent—to May—before Mike crashed in and threw the woman into a wall, knocking her out cold. Now, Skye’s van is parked at the train station as she sends coordinates back to the plane’s system and deletes Mike’s identity for him. Coulson and his Robocop show up, but Mike blows right through them, hauling her and Ace behind him through the station until Skye manages to cause enough of a distraction to twist free and run for an exit. Mike catches up with her and seizes her arm just when a gunshot and its resulting impact destroy the desk over her shoulder. Confused and terrified, Skye staggers behind him has he drags her up an emergency stair to the gallery above, looking for his son. Another gunshot rings out behind them, and Mike abruptly releases her arm.

Skye turns in time to see him plunge over the rail, hearing a crash below but unable to take her eyes from the uniformed policeman and the rifle now pointed at her…

In a blur of black, Agent may suddenly appears behind him, knocking the gun away and disabling him in four swift moves. Skye’s hand is burning as May rises from a steady crouch and moves towards her.

“You ok?” she says, grabbing Skye’s arm to pull her to her feet.

Skye lets herself be pulled up and grabs the woman’s hand.

The contact does not come with a climax of the pain—it triggers the sudden disappearance of it. Skye feels her eyes go wide as the stares at their joined hands, the way they both briefly glow like Mike’s face was a moment ago, but the light disappears along with the pain.

May almost immediately yanks her hand back, but as it parts, a red string stretches after it, joining her fingertip to Skye’s own. The thread disappears in seconds too, but the answer remains in the space between them.

“Oh my god,” Skye breathes, looking up at the woman, whose own eyes briefly betray the shock…or something else…that she is feeling too.

But Mike is now yelling at Coulson downstairs, and their work isn’t done yet. Agent May spins Skye roughly and hurries her towards the stairs.

“Let’s go.”

**Author's Note:**

> Sorry for it to end so abruptly, but I literally cannot commit to tackling a multichap of this AU, which is what I feel like it calls for. I may follow up with another chap in the future, but for now I'm going to leave it here.


End file.
